A short comment on the early development of Odense

ABSTRACT

In a recent overview of the material from eighth to twelfth century Odense, Runge and Henriksen propose to move the date of the town’s foundation by a hundred years, to the early tenth century. In this brief comment we challenge their interpretation of the earliest Odense, and point to some problems with their definition of what constitutes towns and proto-towns, as well as the analysis of the material they present.

KEYWORDS:

• Proto-town
• town
• Viking Age
• medieval period
• Odense
• urban

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish National Research Foundation under the [grant DNRF119] – Center of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet).